Calm Amidst Chaos

How to achieve peace of mind in every day hassled life. Well I speak from personal experience – I found immense peace in chanting. No, trust me, I am not advocating priesthood or asking you to become a monk. Everyday things started becoming less chaotic and more clam. A howling baby, burning food, dusty rooms, unmade bed, sink full of dirty dishes, piles of ironing, dirty laundry… Yes, amidst all that, I was still calm.
You see, the trick is a simple two step process
§ Daily chanting
§ Little planning and a little ignoring (more like looking at the bigger picture)

Lets start with chanting – find a place, any place, even a rocking chair with a sleeping baby on top of you is also fine. Breathe deeply for a minute, close your eyes and repeat in your mind, “I am inspired, disciplined and energized” 100 times (initially begin with 30 ). The catch is to do it every day, same time, same place for atleast one month. Don’t skip on weekends. If it’s not possible to do it at the usual time, then do it in the evening or morning or night. Just be regular and you will soon see a major difference.
Chanting is done to let the thoughts flow freely in your mind. Once it becomes a part of your routine, you will find that after chanting you are fresh to start anew with gusto. The interesting thing is that though our mind is filled with innumerable thoughts , we can think only one thing at a time- go on see it for your self. So when you are chanting you are filling your mind with this positive affirmation. This will help you succeed in all the walks of life, be it being a better mother, wife, employee, boss or a spiritual being.

Let’s come to the second component i.e. planning- I am not asking you to work according to minute allocation. All I am saying is to divide work into big chunks of work and assign each chunk a particular day.
For example: making bed and doing dishes – daily
Dusting - twice a week
Ironing - twice or thrice a week
Laundry - once a week etc.

Once you have allocated each day to a chore, do only that chore on the assigned day and that too in spurts and bursts. I mean, do not try to complete the chore in one go, instead do it for 15 – 20 min then care for baby or cook. This way you will always be focused on your priorities i.e. caring for your family and having time for your self. Remember ten years from now will the amount of cleaning matter? House work is done to support the proper functioning of family, the focal point of our lives.
The biggest calming effect is- hugging and kissing your child when all you want to do is explode with anger or stress.

Incase you are not able to finish the work on a particular day, remember tomorrow is another day and some times you have to forsake cleanliness for the sake of the needs of your little one. Bible says cleanliness is a duty of every woman but a spic and span house is a house of a barren. “He maketh the barren woman to keep house, [and to be] a joyful mother of children”. Psalm 113:9

If you have grown up kids and you are still stuck in an untidy rut then visit this great site http://www.flylady.com/ .

Warm regards
Pls leave your comments about this article

Thoughts

The Power of Thought
Thoughts are what our mind is made of. You might feel you have no control over your thoughts but that’s not true. The key to controlling your thoughts is awareness. Be aware of what you are thinking at every moment of your day and each time you think a negative thought, replace it by a positive one.
Repeat the following affirmation “I am the master of my thoughts”. You will soon find that a positive change is taking place in your outlook and once that happens your life will change forever.
After all it is how we perceive and process a particular situation or circumstance that determines our reaction and thought towards it. Lets take an example- you are in a party and this stranger who is talking to you is avoiding looking at you. Your reaction towards this can be any of the following depending upon how you processed the situation:
§ He/She is shy
§ He/She finds me boring and wants to get rid of me
§ What a weird person

So you see positive, outlook is very important and that comes from the thoughts, and they come from awareness.
Just be:
§ Aware of your thought.
§ Replace the negative thought with a positive one.
§ Accompany it with a positive bodily sensation i.e. when you are feeling good what signs does your body show e.g. smiling, sitting up tall, gesturing etc.

Decisions, Decisions & more Decisions

I met a lady at my son’s bus stop today and we started chatting. It was very sad to see her justifying her decision to work in an office. She said that she is educated and worked hard to carve a niche for herself and she cannot let go of all that for her child.
She felt she had done ample research to see if there were any bad effects on children if the mother was working. On the contrary, she found children of working mothers were more independent. Besides she was expecting a huge salary raise in the near future, imagine what that could do to the child’s future !
It set me thinking…what makes one person decide one thing and another something quite contrary to it? Can our decisions be termed as good or bad? And who decides which decision is good or bad ?

Well! For starters, we all know we make decisions based on our schemas or our values that were instilled in us from childhood by our parents, school, society, and our nurturing or environment in which we were brought up.
As for a decision being good or bad, I feel there are no good or bad decisions. Based on the outcome of those decision we label the decision as good or bad. So it depends on the outcome which at the time of deciding cannot be predicted. Seriously can you really predict the outcome of a particular decision? According to Edward De Bono each decision has millions of outcomes limited only by our imagination. For example deciding something as simple as ‘how to use a spoon’ has so many outcomes:

• To eat food
• To hang it upside down as wind chime
• To look at its back and draw the image (trust me it comes out very unusual)
• To flick peas across the table with it :-)

Therefore the best way to make decision is to consider it in two steps:
Emotional: does it feel right in your heart and will it benefit someone in some way?
Logical : what is it costing me in terms of time and effort and is it worth it?

Once you make a decision, stick to it with confidence. No need to justify it to anyone, not even you.
Rationalization is a way to quieten a guilty conscience.